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Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Lunar Shower Details

Update - I added a section on the possibility of skipping the Lunar Shower Talent all together.

Yesterday, I posted about the data mined info showing that Moonfire/Sunfire would now generate energy if you were buffed with Lunar Shower, and guessed that it was a replacement of last weeks patch notes indicating all DoTs would generate energy. That has now been confirmed. Here is the official patch note.

Insect Swarm now generates 8 Lunar Energy for Balance druids.

Moonfire now generates 8 Solar Power for Balance druids.

Sunfire now generates 8 Lunar Energy for Balance druids.

Lunar Shower has been redesigned. When casting Moonfire, the druid gains Lunar Shower. Lunar Shower increases the direct damage done by Moonfire by 15/30/45%, and reduces the mana cost by 10/20/30%. This effect stacks up to 3 times and lasts 3 seconds. While under the effects of Lunar Shower, Moonfire generates 8 Solar Energy, and Sunfire generates 8 Lunar Energy. The amount of Lunar/Solar Energy gained does not change based on the number of points spent in the talent, or stacks of Lunar Shower. Those druids who wish to delay transition in or out of an Eclipse state should now cast the one of their two basic attacks which will not move the Eclipse bar (either Starfire or Wrath).

Since this is what I assumed was being implemented my comments yesterday about how this would affect our rotation still stands. Single target fights should see little impact. Even dual target fights won't see a lot of impact if you time the refreshes correctly. Mostly this takes away a tool for us to delay an eclipse transition using Lunar Shower and Moonfire/Sunfire. Oddly enough this should nerf the elite players but have a smaller impact on the more average players. That said there are two interesting parts to this patch note.

Delaying Eclipse: One of the main criticisms of the old patch notes was that it took away the ability for players to delay eclipse transitions by using Lunar Shower and Moonfire. I find it interesting Blizzard addressed this concern directly. They said:

Those druids who wish to delay transition in or out of an Eclipse state should now cast the one of their two basic attacks which will not move the Eclipse bar (either Starfire or Wrath).

Blizzard's basically telling us they hear the concern but tough. We will have to deal with it because that is the activity they didn't like.

I know some people won't like the answer, but you have to like the direct way they addressed the concern.

Movement Stacking: The other interesting thing I saw in the patch note is that there is no mention of Lunar Shower Stacking with movement like in the current tool tip. This is a suggestion Hamlet made to the developers and it sounds like they have taken them up on the idea. Instead it sounds like Lunar shower will stack with multiple applications of Moonfire.

If I'm not reading to much into the patch note this is a bit of a nerf to our movement DPS, because it will take longer to stack Lunar Shower. However, I doubt it's all that significant. Movement generally isn't that long anyway and not it's not a huge part of our DPS total.

Edit - Skipping the Lunar Shower Talent

Now that Lunar Shower is being redesigned many people are asking, can we skip Lunar Shower the Talent?

This is in no way conclusive or scientific, but I tried to do a little backwords math using a WoL parse for Imsupersdw of Method. He is obviously one of the elite moonkin players out there and has the overall number 2 ranking on heroic Maloriak. I used this parse to back into some numbers.

To give it a best case senario I assumed that ever Moonfire and Sunfire cast was done with a full stack of Lunar Shower. If that was true then the Lunar Shower buff was responcible for 2.0% of is overall damage on the fight. However, the real impact is obviously less then that since there is impossible for him to have a full stack of Lunar shower for all of those casts. In fact, his Lunar Shower uptime was 45%. I did the same math for his Chimeron kill and found that Lunar Shower was worth at most 1% of his DPS, with a 25% uptime on Lunar Shower.

This says to me that the Lunar Shower buff doesn't have a big impact on DPS, since it's worth at most 2.0% on the optimal fight for one of the best moonkins in the world. It has to be worth significantly less on an average fight my an average player.

If Patch 4.2 went live today, I could see dropping Lunar Shower entirely since it would make our lives a little easier without a huge drop in DPS.

That said, I wouldn't expect this to go live as is. The forums have been very busy talking about the possibility of dropping Lunar Shower from the talent build and I'm sure Blizzard has seen it. The entire purpose of this change is to prevent us from staying in Eclipse and doing Multi DoD AoE and Moonfire spam. Blizzard won't want their efforts to be avoided. I expect we will see another change that will bake some DPS into Lunar Shower and make it a Mandetory Talent.

Other Changes:The lunar shower change was the big thing but there are a couple of other little changes that you may be interested in.

Earth and Moon's duration has been increased to 15 seconds, up from 12.

Wild Mushroom: Detonate can now also trigger Earth and Moon, in addition to Starfire and Wrath.

My guess is this is being done to standardize the spell damage Debuff across classes. Warlocks and Death Knights could already spread their Earth and Moon like Debuffs in an AoE fashion. This just brings moonkin up to that level. I doubt it will have a big impact on the game but it could be a big boost for the 10man groups that rely on a moonkin to spread the spell damage debuff.

Fungal Growth spell visual effect has been updated to be less visually intrusive and more aesthetic.

8 comments:

This is a nice design. I'll be happy not to have to shift around any more when spamming moonfire. Granted, it's kinda cute seeing moonkin bob around like gummy bears. It gets old, though, and on more occasions than I'd like to admit, I've accidentally body pulled an extra trash pack.

They could leave the movement component of Lunar Shower in, it would hardly matter. With the other changes moonkin will rarely want to mass spam dots with the Lunar Shower buff on since it will either put you in Eclipse before you want to be in it or take you out of Eclipse before you want to be out. Lunar Shower now has very little benefit and a significant drawback, without further alterations it may be skipped altogether

I don't mind the change as much for delaying an eclipse, but i used lunar showers alot for dotting up adds on halfus, maloriak, even magmaw. Even without lunar showers, it'd be beneficial to dot up adds in those fights, 2 of which you are moving a lot. Would it be more beneficial to just bypass that talent completely?

You say that it wouldnt really matter if we took points out of Lunar Shower. What would you put the points in if we take the points out. I did some testing on specs and there is nothing that would really up the dps in a different talent (assuming you already took all points out of Furor).

Camhen-It's not that the DPS from lunar showers isn't worth the points, it is. It's just that with the changes, it's not worth having over being able to hold eclipse states. I don't think it would matter much where we put our points (maybe moonglow since I can see some of us continuing to spam MF/SF while running till we break the habit and potentially go oom). The important part of this is that we would be able to control our eclipses states still.

it's funny to not even see the other aspect of lunar shower mentioned, mana redux. You think you can just not take the talent and still multi dot? I'd like to see someone not get the mana from eclipse and just throw dots around at full cost. It's basically there to kill a lengthy multi-dot. Good for single target movement fights and pvp. Basically guarantees you can give up innervates for rest of expansion even if they are bad now.

I have thought of the mana situation as well, but I don't think that it'll be as difficult as it may of been, like at the start of Cata. It does mean that we will be self innervating, but as innervate was already getting turned into crap for other people in 4.2, that doesn't seem to be too huge.Rather than making this whole heavy nerf to both our single (referring to nerfs that resulted in 4.0.6 and 4.1) and aoe damage, and pushing us to the bottom of the ranged dps output pile (if 4.2 goes live as is), while also crippling our mobile dps, while buffing everyone else's, I would like to see them actually take direction with the class.Cataclysm brought with it, the intent with many classes to make previously unwanted buttons, useful again. Rather than nerfing multi dots to the ground, they should look towards fixing hurricane, such as lowering it's completely over the top mana requirements, increase damage a bit. Perhaps in the lunar shower talent, it could be possible to make hurricane and mushrooms deal arcane damage when a druid is in lunar eclipse. I suspect that this whole heavy mechanic nerf is an attempt to remove the forethought put into fights and timing your eclipses, thus removing some of the skill disparity between good and bad balance druids. If that is the case, then fixes to the problems that led to the creative uses of these mechanics needs to be addressed.